Passing thoughts

[branchandroot]

Sometimes I trip across an example of that intensely weird "you can only be in fandom until you're 30" thing that some of the kidlets have been taught to parrot these days. And sometimes it annoys me, and sometimes it just makes me shake my head, and then again sometimes it makes me think...

Melville was 57 when he wrote very thinly veiled self-insert expies of himself and Hawthorne falling in love for 18,000 lines of an epic poem about war and politics and religion and sex and identity.

(That was Clarel, if you're wondering, and they also had a bit of a threesome going on with the young title character.)

So you know, A) Rolfe/Vine 4evar and B) you never age out.

Comments

[edenfalling]

The whole "adults can't have fun" attitude is incredibly frustrating to me -- and particularly so in relation to fandom, which was, of course, created by adults (and mostly adult women to boot).

I think some of it is rooted in the current trend where anything you don't like is somehow equated to pedophilia and therefore adults are inherently EVIL. I think a lot more is rooted in sexism and the idea that women's pleasure is inherently suspect.

And then, of course, there's the thing where anything you like as a teen must inevitably be disclaimed and shunned as you become an adult because OH THE SHAME!!!!, so naturally adults can't possibly like the same things a teen currently likes, and if they do, there is something deeply shady and wrong about them. I think some of that reaction is just an inevitability of growing up, but it's been strengthened and warped by the pedophilia craze and pervasive sexism, and the resulting stew is doing nobody any favors.

[branchandroot]

Yeah, I'm thinking there's going to be a lot of young adults with very messed up heads in another five-ten years. Actually, I kind of hope there are, because the alternative is that they keep thinking this.